A recent edition of the Atlantic Monthly carried a series of short articles on creativity, and one of their short profiles was an interview with Frank Gehry which I reproduce below. (Click here for the original article). And here is why I am sharing this with you this morning, namely my attempt to understand the early minutes of his (and yours and my) creative process. I am uber-struck by the relations between his initial pen sketches as his mind wanders about his problem, and the building that he finally makes happen a couple of years later. What is going on in his head? For that matter what is going on in MY (or your) head when an idea germinates, which in time and with luck and hard work just may turn into something that does an interesting job. Anyway I am fascinated, and if you have not seen the excellent documentary that Sydney Pollack made on this a few years back, you can catch a trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu9orvtStdY. In the meantime excuse me, I have some important doodling to do.

Frank Gehry

ARCHITECT

Project: Design the building for the New World Symphony in Miami

A winner of the Pritzker Prize, Gehry has staked a claim as perhaps the most acclaimed architect of his day. His sculptural, curvilinear style has become a trademark—and is on display in his design for the New World Symphony building, which opened in Miami earlier this year. Here he shares his New World Symphony sketches and describes how he approaches his projects.

Sketches Courtesy: Gehry Partners, LLP

Image credit: Claudia Uribe

Architecture is a service business. An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art—or at least people call it that.

I work in model; the young kids now are going to be able to work in computer. But I make a model of the site. There are some obvious things: where the entrance should be, where the cars have to go in. You start to get the scale of it. You understand the client’s needs, and what the client is hoping for and yearning for. Once I understand all that, it’s easy to sketch in scale. So quite often, the first sketches are incredibly, uncannily close to the final building—I don’t understand that, really. Compared with when I was just starting out, I’m faster now. I’m better. I know where the bullshit is. I’m pretty good at editing it out before I let it go too far.

I work from the inside out. The sketches may imply form, but they’re educated implications. These have interior and exterior. For example, when I did this sketch [top, sketch], with the box on the right-hand side, it’s in the same proportion—I knew that the box for the theater would be there. Then I drew what’s inside [below, sketch]. Above the stage, the ceiling and the sides have to reflect the sound of the orchestra, and they have to be made a certain thickness—two inches of solid cement plaster. The idea is for them to disperse sound in all directions at once, which means a spherical shape.

Image credit: Rui Dias-Adios

Some people may say my curved panels look like sails. Well, I am a sailor, so I guess I probably do use that metaphor in my work—though not consciously. I mean, why did de Kooning put so much paint on his brush? He probably didn’t know, himself. He kept doing the same thing so much that he probably realized it was something he liked. I always say this process is like the cat with the ball of twine. You’re intuitive, but your intuition is informed.

Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. “The client made me do this.” “The city made me do this.” “Oh, the budget.” I don’t believe that anymore. In the end, you have to rise above them. You have to say you solved all that. You’re bringing an informed aesthetic point of view to a visual problem. You have freedom, so you have to make choices—and at the point when I make a choice, the building starts to look like a Frank Gehry building. It’s a signature.